Wisconsin

A river's reckoning

A recreational boater glides along the Chicago River in late June. In 1900, Chicago reversed the flow of the river so its sewage would no longer flow into Lake Michigan and contaminate its main source of drinking water.

The Chicago River was engineered a century ago to carry away the city's waste, but today it is full of trouble for all the Great Lakes.

Since 2003, reporter Dan Egan has been reporting on threats facing the lakes. His groundbreaking work has shown the damage caused by invasive species and has laid out the bold steps that could be taken to restore and protect the world’s largest freshwater system.

Chicago likes to think of the filth flowing in its namesake river as nobody's business but its own, and for most of the last century that might have been true. But today that dirty water has become a problem for all the Great Lakes - the world's largest freshwater system and a drinking water source for 40 million people.

Blame the Asian carp.

More than a century ago, the city reversed the Chicago River to carry its sewage away from Lake Michigan and into a Mississippi River-bound canal system. Today, those canals have become a flashpoint in the battle to protect the Great Lakes from the leaping carp that can devastate prized fish populations and inflict brutal blows on unsuspecting boaters.

With the invaders finning their way up the canal waters toward the Lake Michigan shoreline, a push is on to reconstruct the natural barrier between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basins that the Chicago canals destroyed so long ago.

It is a project that would almost surely mean that Chicago's river - and some of the city's wastewater - would again flow into Lake Michigan.

This itself would be an ecological disaster - if Chicago sewage officials can't figure out how to clean up sewage discharges that are among the nastiest in the nation.

Chicago has a rare distinction among major American cities: It does not employ a disinfection stage at its three main sewage treatment plants.

The result is a river and canal system running so thick with fecal coliform that signs along the banks warn that the contents below are not suitable for "any human body contact."

It is poison, basically.

Even before the carp arrived, conservationists had been pushing the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago to not just do basic sewage treatment, but also to disinfect its discharges, a step nearly every other major American city takes. That's something the district boss dismisses as not worth the expense, which would be no more than $2 to $3 per household per month according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The reclamation district shows no signs of budging on the issue, even as pressure mounts to do whatever it will take to safeguard the Great Lakes - and its $7 billion fishing industry - from what biologists call a menacing invader.

That's not what reclamation district boss Richard Lanyon calls the fish.

He calls them "these stupid Asian carp."

The big flush

Chicago has been treating Lake Michigan like a giant toilet tank since it engineered a crude sewer system to suck from the lake about 6 billion gallons of water per day, a flow big enough to drain a body of water the size of Lake Winnebago in a single summer.

You can think of that colossal water grab as a super-size flush, inside a continent-sized commode. Chicagoland's raw sewage once plunged into the man-made Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, and that canal whooshed the Windy City stew into the Mississippi River and down to the Gulf of Mexico, Chicago's toilet bowl.

Before canal construction in 1900, the city simply dumped its feces into the Chicago River, a fetid dribble that flowed into Lake Michigan - Chicago's drinking water source.

This wasn't just gross, it was deadly; about 2,000 Chicagoans a year succumbed to typhoid.

"It was a matter of survival," Lanyon says of channeling the polluted river so it flowed away from the lake.

The city's decision to blast a canal through the continental divide that separates the waters of the Great Lakes and Mississippi guaranteed Chicago a boundless supply of safe freshwater, fueling its growth and development for decades to come.

It also ignited courtroom battles.

Neighboring Great Lakes states claimed Chicago stole their water and permanently lowered Lake Michigan; St. Louis was revolted that Chicago sewage flowed from its faucets, diluted as it was by the time it got to town.

In a 1930 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed reduced flows in the canal to protect Chicagoans from "possible pestilence and ruin" had they continued to drink what they flushed.

Since then, the Midwest has tolerated Chicago's crap, but politicians are now lining up to do something about its carp - and its canal system.

First a fix, then a mess

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley convened a summit seven years ago that drew scientists, engineers and invasive species experts to figure out how to stop the inexorable advance of invading carp toward the Great Lakes.

The canal had indeed been a forceful solution to the city's 19th century sewage problem. But by the beginning of the 21st century, the true costs of destroying a continental divide - which some conservationists refer to as Chicago's "original sin" - were finally coming into focus as water, waste and noxious species mixed in a manner nature never intended.

Pipe-clogging invasive mussels from the Caspian Sea region - which have shredded the Great Lakes' food web and cost billions of dollars to industries and municipalities - rode Chicago's canal waters out of Lake Michigan and into the rest of America. They were followed by round gobies, a prolific predator of native fish species' eggs. Today a fish-killing, ebola-like virus is threatening to spill inland from southern Lake Michigan, an invasion that could have dire consequences for fish farmers in the South.

With Asian carp on the way north, Daley knew by 2003 that it was time to do something "bold" to deal with the economic and ecological consequences of linking America's two grand drainage basins.

"The longer you put off solving a problem, the more it costs you in the long run," Daley told the group. "An aggressive solution to a problem is almost always cheaper than repairing the damage later."

The group brainstormed for two days and concluded it was time to atone for the destruction; it was time to reconstruct the continental divide by putting a barrier in the canal.

But the solution Daley had asked for was widely dismissed as outlandish.

Tilting river flows back toward Lake Michigan in dinner plate-flat Chicago would likely require costly upgrades in the city's sewage system because it would no longer have the luxury of flushing its bacteria-laden waste downstream.

Damming the canals also would mean trouble for the barge industry that relies on free-flowing water to float industrial goods such as coal, salt, cement and chemicals.

Then came the carp.

In November, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged that new environmental DNA sampling revealed the fish had breached the lake's last line of defense on the canal, an electric barrier system about 35 miles downstream from Lake Michigan.

Government agencies have since dumped about $4.5 million worth of fish poison into the Chicago waterways as an emergency dose of chemotherapy to try to knock back the spreading ecological malignancy.

The poisoning is part of a $78 million federal emergency plan to buy the Great Lakes some more time. It includes three electric fish barriers in the canal and research into beating back the invaders with bubbles, lights and even noise.

Criticized as more desperate and disparate than directed, few believe these quirky schemes offer the Great Lakes any long-term protection.

Yet the seeds planted at Daley's summit seven years ago are finally beginning to sprout, and it's not just Illinois' neighbors who are pushing for big changes on the 110 year-old canal.

In late June - just three days after a 3-foot long Asian carp was found six miles downstream from Lake Michigan - Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin proposed legislation forcing the Army Corps to expedite a study of what it will take to separate the canals from Lake Michigan.

Even canal operators realize the days of a free flow to the Gulf of Mexico may be numbered.

"Could it happen?" says reclamation district executive director Lanyon. "Sure. It would be challenging, but it could happen."

And one reason it could happen is that remarkable progress has been made since 1900 in technologies to disinfect waste discharged from sewage treatment plants.

Arteries and intestines

The 1972 Clean Water Act led to a universal push by environmental regulators to try to force cities everywhere to treat their rivers as the vital arteries that they are.

Except in Chicago.

It still treats its river like an intestine.

"What's happening here is insane," John Quail of the conservation group Friends of the Chicago River says on a steamy mid-May day in the northern suburb of Evanston. Quail is standing on a floating dock in a canal carved a century ago through Chicago's tony north shore suburbs to flush their waste downstream.

At the end of the dock a team of middle-aged moms lowers a crew boat into waters so filthy with fecal coliform - an indicator of the presence of human waste - that it would be illegal in Wisconsin and almost anywhere else.

But not here. Not on the North Shore Channel. Not downstream on the Sanitary and Ship Canal. And not on the Cal-Sag Channel, south of downtown, which also flows into the Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Built primarily to float waste - and therefore given a pass on the normal disinfection requirements - these three canals are thick with bacteria at levels that can be more than 1,000 times higher than what is discharged at Milwaukee's Jones Island sewage treatment plant. It signals the presence of human-borne viruses, bacteria and even worms that can cause everything from hepatitis to respiratory infections to dysentery.

Cities typically have strict limits on how much fecal coliform they can discharge; Jones Island discharged an average of 29 fecal colony forming units per 100 milliliters of water in 2008. Records from the Chicago Reclamation District show the North Side treatment plant averaged 12,279, with daily spikes as high as 170,000. At Chicago's big three reclamation treatment plants, there is no cap.

The reason, essentially, is Chicago treatment plants discharge into a sanitary canal, giving wastewater a chance to dilute and be cleansed naturally before it reaches a river.

Chicago now caring

The sewage situation doesn't fit with the self-image of a city led by a mayor whose goal is to make it the "most environmentally friendly city in the nation."

When people realize what the reclamation district is putting into the picturesque river, Friends of the Chicago River executive director Margaret Frisbie says, people are "shocked and disgusted."

The Natural Resources Defense Council's Henry Henderson still shakes his head at an episode last year during the heat of the failed push to land the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Chicago's hope was to host the world's first "Blue-Green Games," focusing on environmental protection and showcasing its urban shoreline and waterways.

As part of the campaign, the bid committee's Environment Advisory Council wanted to take a visiting international delegation on a boat ride down the Chicago River.

Henderson suggested the event might be an appropriate time to announce that, in the spirt of the Blue-Green motto, Chicago was going to begin disinfecting the sewage discharges that account for the majority of the water in the Chicago canal system.

The environment advisory council members were stunned that such filth flows daily through the heart of their city.

"You could just see their faces as they tried to figure it out," says Frisbie, also an environment advisory council member. "They were saying: What? What? They didn't believe it."

"Well, Mr. Mayor?"

Mayor Daley wants the reclamation district to start disinfecting its discharges.

So does Governor Pat Quinn, as does Attorney General Lisa Madigan, as well as a bipartisan group of congressmen from the region.

But they don't run the sewer system that serves most all of Cook County - including about 125 communities outside Chicago city limits.

Lanyon and his elected board do, and they don't want to pay for it. Lanyon says even if the district did raise the money to install disinfection systems, a state tax cap means the district could not afford to run them at its three major plants, Stickney, North Side and Calumet.

Lanyon points to a soon-to-be released epidemiological study his district commissioned that will show the canal water isn't getting people sick at any higher rate than other water bodies.

Critics say the study doesn't prove people aren't contracting bugs and passing them along to others. They also contend the study doesn't take into account that many people don't use the canals the same way they use other bodies of water, precisely because of the dangers.

Many of those who do venture onto the canals do so with great caution.

The leafy North Shore channel is a training ground for college crew teams, as well as high school rowers, many of whom see the dirty water as the best route to a varsity letter, and perhaps college scholarship.

Space for all rowers is tight on busy training days, and on weekends they have to dodge droves of kayakers and canoeists.

All of them float past the warning signs lining the banks that caution against any body contact at all.

Only a fool - or an unsupervised child trying to beat the heat on a hot summer day - would purposely take a dip in the North Shore Channel, but that doesn't mean people aren't getting wet.

New Trier Township High School assistant crew coach Hope Poor says her kids are schooled to wash well after practice, scrub popped blisters and keep their heads above water on the rare occasion someone takes an accidental plunge.

"All of the kids are aware of how dirty the water is," Poor says.

Sometimes that's not enough. Poor remembers one student who was forced to drop out of the sport.

"She got two staph infections from cuts on her leg and her mother wouldn't let her row anymore," she says.

The girl, she says, wasn't part of the reclamation district's epidemiological study.

'Not your babbling brook'

Lanyon says people should know what they're getting into when they go on the water.

"This is not your babbling brook. . . . It's an open channel or a pipe," he says.

And that characterization has made all the difference.

In the years just after passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, the district was disinfecting its wastewater, but beginning in the mid-1980s it convinced state regulators it wasn't worth the expense because nobody was fishing or swimming in the waters.

The reclamation district also argued the chlorine it was putting into the water was doing more harm than good to fish, though that problem is easily solved with a dechlorination stage, as is done in Milwaukee.

The state of Illinois responded by giving the district a pass on disinfection.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which commonly delegates Clean Water Act enforcement to individual states, could have stepped in and put the hammer down. Instead it let it slide, and the dirty water has been flowing since.

"The river wasn't used that much for recreation and the U.S. EPA basically said, 'We're not going to take on the state of Illinois and the (reclamation) district and fight them over this,' " says Dale Bryson, former director of U.S. EPA's regional water division, and also a former board chairman for the Alliance for the Great Lakes. "It was just a decision we made because we had other things that were a higher priority."

Disinfection issues aside, Bryson says the reclamation district has made big strides in cleaning canal waters in recent decades. He points to Chicago's deep tunnel and reservoir project that already has reduced overflows from about once every three days to about once a month. Overflows typically happen in big rains when treatment plants are overwhelmed and raw sewage gets dumped in the canals.

Once the reservoir system is finished, sometime in the 2020s, it will ratchet overflows down to one to three per year, and perhaps zero, says Illinois EPA's Rob Sulski.

The overflow reduction already has caused fish populations in the canal system to explode and, ironically, may have opened the door to the Asian carp. In previous decades they might not have been able to survive in the canal.

Still, the waterway will never be safe for humans until discharges coming out of the treatment plants are disinfected.

"The district is a pretty progressive outfit other than the last few years, when they decided to say no to everything," says Bryson.

Illinois EPA is now recommending that the district begin disinfecting, and the Illinois Pollution Control Board, which sets environmental rules for the state, is weighing the matter.

While the U.S. EPA has deferred to the state on the matter for decades, that could soon change.

"At some point, if we feel like it's dragging on and on and on, we'll have to decide whether or not we need to step in," says U.S. EPA's Holst.

The carp might well force the issue.

The Natural Resources Defense Council's Henderson isn't surprised the reclamation district has dug in its heels on disinfection and is dismissing the threat the carp pose.

"It has a long history of being a very insular institution," he says.

"The only public input they want is when you flush your toilet."

In the district's hands

The reclamation district has been taking issues into its own hands since canal builders slipped out of town on a train under the cover of darkness on Jan. 17, 1900, racing 30 miles downstream to open the canal and beat a feared U.S. Supreme Court injunction sought by Missouri.

That chilly morning, a dam was opened for the first time and a green sheet of water tumbled forth. Lake Michigan and the Mississippi basin were wed in a ceremony the New York Times characterized as one of "undignified haste."

More than 100 years later, the fight sparked by that late-night raid on the continent's circulatory system continues.

This winter, Wisconsin and several other states hoped the threat of Asian carp would persuade the Supreme Court to re-open an ongoing case over the canal that was initially filed in the 1920s. The Supreme Court justices declined, but Great Lakes politicians outside Illinois are pushing for a new law that would require the U.S. Army Corps to immediately shut down two navigation locks on the canal system as an emergency - and crude - attempt to once again separate the lake from the Mississippi.

Illinois politicians and business leaders have argued against an emergency lock closure. They say the lock gates aren't entirely waterproof so they might still allow fish to pass through.

Shutting them with essentially no notice would also deal a brutal blow to a barge industry that is largely a byproduct of the sewage canals.

And closing the locks permanently at this point likely would also cause severe flooding because the canal system is designed to flow backwards into the lake if big rains overwhelm the treatment plants. Operators respond by diverting straight sewage into the canal and gates are opened so the waste can tumble into Lake Michigan.

But it's possible that separation might be accomplished in a way that would not force flooding and still accommodate, if not enhance, regional barge traffic.

Yet it will take planning and time - time the Great Lakes might not have.

Biologists say this is a bigger issue than just Asian carp.

It is about the biological integrity of the Great Lakes, home to about 20% of the globe's fresh surface water, a geographic phenomenon every bit as unique as the Himalayas.

The freshwater seas evolved essentially isolated from the rest of the aquatic world.

They were protected on the east by the towering Niagara Falls and on the west by the continental divide that separated them from the Mississippi River basin.

Canada's Welland Canal, first constructed in the 1800s, allowed oceangoing vessels - and the ruinous critters they unintentionally carry - to bypass Niagara Falls, and the front door to the Great Lakes swung wide open.

The back door opened wide when Chicagoans blasted their way into the Mississippi basin.

The result is that today the Great Lakes are home to more than 185 non-native species, and a delicate balance established over 10,000 years has been destroyed in a matter of decades.

That doesn't mean the lakes have seen everything the globe can send them.

The reviled northern snakehead, for example, is already loose in the Mississippi basin. The razor-toothed fish that can breathe air and slither short distances across land is a prime candidate to follow the carp north toward the lakes.

"This whole issue should not be framed in terms of carp. It's about lots of other species," says David Lodge, the University of Notre Dame professor who pioneered the DNA testing in the canals.

There is another reason Chicago needs to rethink its 19th century approach to managing its water, says Josh Ellis, a water supply specialist for the area's nonprofit Metropolitan Planning Council.

He looks down the road and sees a congested megalopolis going dry if it doesn't figure out how to better use the 2.1 billion gallon per day cap of lake water that was imposed by the Supreme Court as a result of the decades-old lawsuit.

Soon enough, he says, the foolishness of using much of its precious water budget to flush the city's waste is going to become apparent.

Under the Supreme Court ruling, every drop the city returns to Lake Michigan is a drop Chicago can use to slake its thirst and fuel its businesses.

"Over the next 100 years Chicago will be at a disadvantage in terms of water supply," says Ellis. "And I think that's the real reason to build a separation - it's about the water."

And the money that goes with it.

***

By the numbers

29

Average fecal-colony forming units per 100 milliliters of water discharged in 2008 at Milwaukee's Jones Island facility

About Dan Egan

Dan Egan is a reporter covering the Great Lakes. His reporting on invasive species and other issues has won numerous awards. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for explanatory reporting, in 2010 and 2013.